Shaun Nichols reports: The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – a government agency tasked with safeguarding citizens’ bank accounts – deliberately covered up a cyberattack by China to protect its incoming chairman. This is according to a damning report from Republican members of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who slammed the bank…
Category: Government Sector
Leaky database leaves Oklahoma police, bank vulnerable to intruders
Dell Cameron reports: A leaky database has exposed the physical security of multiple Oklahoma Department of Public Safety facilities and at least one Oklahoma bank. The vulnerability—which has reportedly been fixed—was revealed on Tuesday by Chris Vickery, a MacKeeper security researcher who this year has revealed numerous data breaches affecting millions of Americans. The misconfigured…
Laptop theft puts personal information of hundreds of Pennsylvania taxpayers at risk
WTAE reports that the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue is notifying 865 taxpayers whose information was on a stolen laptop. Why they would claim this notification is in an “abundance of caution” defies belief. An “abundance of caution” would have involved deploying adequate security and not leaving the damned laptops in an unattended vehicle. Read more…
AU: Breach sees abusive dad given address to his kids
It’s these “small breaches” that are often the most worrisome, as I’ve said ad nauseum for a decade. Here’s a case where an agency screws up, and their incident response is appalling – and dare I say, negligent. Yahoo7 reports: A violent father barred from seeing his children has been handed their new address in a…
Former Cumming Police Officer Charged with Accepting Bribe for Unlawfully Accessing a Law Enforcement Database
Former Cumming, Georgia, Police Officer Nathan VanBuren has been arraigned after being charged with wire fraud and computer fraud. According to U.S. Attorney Horn, the charges, and other information presented in court: In July 2015, VanBuren, in his official capacity as a police officer, responded to a 911 call at a citizen’s home in Cumming,…
FBI chief says Guccifer lied about hacking into Clinton’s email server
Michael Kan reports: A Romanian hacker’s claim that he broke into Hillary Clinton’s private email server in 2013 was a lie, according to the FBI. Marcel Lehel Lazar, also known as Guccifer, has boasted about the breach to various media outlets, saying in May that it had been “easy.” But on Thursday, FBI director James…